|
Department News
Department Renamed
Anyone who woke up after a weekend in Mexico with a “McCombs MSIS” tattoo
is out of luck. Effective Sept. 1, 2005, the Department of Management
Science and Information Systems will be known as the Department of Information,
Risk and Operations Management (IROM).
This is not just a name change—the department will expand to include
McCombs operations management and supply chain management faculty, who
were previously housed in the Management Department. In other words,
the four disciplines in the IROM Department will be information management
(12 tenure-track faculty members); operations management (10 tenure-track
faculty members); risk management (10 tenure-track faculty members);
and business law (eight tenure-track faculty members).
“The new name,” says McCombs School Dean George Gau, “will better reflect
and communicate the department’s activities.”
According to Tom Shively, the MSIS department chair, the reorganization
will result in an exceptional operations management group. “The management
science faculty is very strong and has been focusing on supply chain
issues for many years,” says Shively. “For example, MSIS professor Gang
Yu is currently on leave to serve as the head of worldwide supply chain
operations for Amazon.com.
“With the contribution of the MSIS department’s management science faculty
to an already strong supply chain program, we believe that the program
will quickly become a top ten program in the nation, ” Shively adds.
Texas Victory Profiled on Barron's
In January, a team of McCombs MBAs won Wake Forest University’s MBA
Marketing Summit, the country’s most prestigious national marketing
case competition. Through a twist of fate, the victory was also the
subject of an 1,800-word profile in Barron’s by Lawrence C. Strauss.
Before the competition began, Strauss serendipitously chose Texas as
the team to track from beginning to end.
“The Texans face stiff competition—Emory, Yale, Western Ontario, Michigan,
UCLA, Wharton and Wake Forest. Thirty-one teams from 21 schools applied,”
wrote Strauss.
After 36 hours of lattes and power point presentations, the prize went
to Wendy Pursch, John Reed, Fernanda Sacasa, Chad Sliva, Diego Szteinhendler,
all MBA ’06, and Rebecca Welch, MBA ’05.
In the words of one judge, “They defined the problem, made a bold recommendation
and backed up why that recommendation was achievable.” Ten days later,
executives from Wachovia, the subject of the case, were “strongly considering”
one of the McCombs team’s primary recommendations.
During the time he spent with the McCombs team, Strauss was impressed
by not just their competence, but also their dignity: “The Longhorns
don’t produce any Apprentice-like story lines: no backstabbing, romances
or evil teammates. By late afternoon, they’re hashing out a marketing
theme. ”
Read Strauss’s complete story in the next issue of Texas magazine, coming
to a mailbox near you this summer.
www.mccombs.utexas.edu/dept/marketing
National Acclaim Continues
In November, the Public Accounting Report, a leading trade publication,
ranked The University of Texas at Austin No. 1 for accounting at all
three levels: undergraduate, graduate-professional and doctoral. This
marks the 11th consecutive year that graduate accounting has been ranked
best in the nation, and the third consecutive year that the department
of accounting, our in-house Secretariat, earned the triple crown.
Members of the faculty continue to be global leaders in the field. Professor
David Platt was recently elected to a three-year term as the North American
chair of the Partnership in International Management, and professor
William Kinney was tapped to join the Advisory Board of the Public Company
Accounting Oversight Board.
Taking a more hands-on approach to corporate governance is adjunct professor
Joseph Wells, ex-FBI agent, criminologist, and founder of the Association
of Certified Fraud Examiners, an organization of nearly 30,000 anti-fraud
professionals.
Professor Michael Granof, meanwhile, continued his march towards media
ubiquity. In the New York Times, he wrote that scandal-ridden college
athletic programs ought to learn something from the downfalls of Enron
and Arthur Anderson. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, he proposed
a new model for textbook pricing. And his plea for politicians to abandon
their quibbling over numbers and speak from the heart about Social Security
ran in the Dallas Morning News.
www.mccombs.utexas.edu/dept/accounting/
Investment Fund Turns 10
In January, the MBA Investment Fund celebrated its tin—that is, 10th—anniversary.
The fund has come a long way since 1995, when the inaugural management
team made its first purchase of Citigroup stock from a windowless room
on the sixth floor of the school. The McCombs School’s fund was unprecedented,
the first industry-education collaboration of its kind. At the time,
it was unheard of for MBAs to deal with real money.
Today, MBA Investment Fund managers conduct their business in the sleek
AIM Trading Center, and many other schools have cottoned on to the wisdom
of letting future fund managers manage funds.
A major milestone for the MBA Investment Fund came in 2001, when Houston
businessmen Gary Crum, MBA ’72, Bob Graham, MBA ’73, and 63 employees
of the AIM Management Group gave $5.5 million to support finance education
at the McCombs School.
“To hire someone who has had access to the way Wall Street works is
really advantageous for us,” Crum said at the time. “It knocks a year
off the learning curve, and that’s very important.”
Of that endowment, $4 million was added to the fund’s assets under management,
and $1 million was devoted to upgrading and maintaining the fund’s trading
room, which was renamed in recognition of the gift.
“The fund has made McCombs a very attractive place for students of finance,”
reflected Graham, who recently joined the fund’s board. “It’s much admired
by other schools and a feather in the cap of the University.”
To read more about the MBA Investment Fund’s first decade in business,
go to www.mccombs.utexas.edu and search for “Real Money.”
www.mccombs.utexas.edu/dept/finance
Huber’s Research Honored
McCombs management professor George Huber was recently honored by the
Academy of Management, which recognized his career achievements by naming
him a Managerial and Organization Cognition Scholar.
One of Huber’s most notable accomplishments is his latest book, “The
Necessary Nature of Future Firms: Attributes of Survivors in a Changing
World.”
We live in an increasingly complex business environment, characterized
by more change, more competition, and more information than ever before.
Huber, a professor of management, argues that companies’ survival under
these conditions will require innovation, shared knowledge throughout
the company, and decisions grounded in scientific and management research.
Perhaps most important of all is the ability to change. Even today’s
best practices, says Huber, may not be good tomorrow.
“When predicting future organizational environments, we must not allow
ourselves to take the easy path and simply extrapolate from recent events,
or even recent trends,” Huber writes. “History shows that short-term
trends are often misleading as indicators of long-term change.”
To avoid that pitfall, executives should arm themselves with as much
knowledge as possible. This is best accomplished by a transparent workplace,
in which employees feel comfortable sharing as much information as they
have. www.mccombs.utexas.edu/dept/management
Professors Predict Insurance Firm Insolvency
Here’s something everyone can agree on: It would be better if all insurance
firms were solvent. But until that day arrives, we should make it a
point to identify the warning signs of insolvency as far in advance
as possible.
In 2004, McCombs MSIS professor emeritus William Cooper, MSIS professor
Patrick Brockett, and marketing professor Linda Golden won the prestigious
Mehr Award for their 1994 paper on this very real governmental and industry
problem.
The Mehr Award is a national research award given out each year by the
American Risk and Insurance Association to papers published 10 years
earlier that have stood the test of time and had a continued impact
on the insurance industry. Utai Pitaktong, who has since earned her
Ph.D. in MSIS and is now with the Texas State Department of Insurance,
co-authored the paper.
For the study the group developed an artificially intelligent neural
networks model that was able to predict the financial health of insurance
firms. Neural networks are mathematical models that consist of many
autonomous yet interconnected individual processing units. They boast
a degree of flexibility and resilience that sometimes eludes even naturally
intelligent individuals. They can recognize patterns, filter out extraneous
information and change in response to a changing environment.
Using this model, the group analyzed statement data from the previous
two years for 243 Texas firms. This method correctly identified the
firm’s current solvency status 89.3 percent of the time.
www.mccombs.utexas.edu/dept/msis
